We have state records retention schedules. Does your setup line up with them?

Florida local agencies work from the Department of State's general records schedule GS1-SL, plus any schedules specific to your functions. It sets how long each kind of record has to be kept, and it varies enormously, from a few months for routine correspondence to permanent for minutes and ordinances.

The distinction that causes most of the trouble:

• Backup exists so you can recover. It holds recent copies, usually going back weeks or months, and it is designed to get you back to yesterday after a failure. It is not built to produce one email from four years ago, and restoring an old backup to find a record is slow and sometimes impossible.
• Retention exists so you can produce. It keeps the record itself for the required period in a form you can search. Different mechanism, different purpose.

If your only plan for a five year retention requirement is that it is probably in a backup somewhere, you do not have retention.

What we configure, in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace: retention policies and labels mapped to the categories your records custodian defines, so email and documents are kept for the required period, cannot be deleted early by a user, and are disposed of when the period ends. Plus the search and export capability to actually produce them.

The division of labor is worth stating clearly. Deciding which records fall in which category and how long each must be kept is a records management determination, made by your clerk or records custodian, sometimes with your attorney. We do not make that call and any vendor who offers to is telling you something they should not. What we do is implement their determination accurately and show them evidence that it is working.

One thing we will advise on. Keeping everything forever feels like the safe choice and it is not. Everything you keep is also everything a public records request reaches, everything discovery in a lawsuit reaches, and everything an attacker who gets into a mailbox reads. Disposing of records when their retention period ends is a legitimate and sensible practice, and the schedule exists partly for that reason.